Diabetes Mellitus and Alternative Medicines

Introduction

The research was done to determine the frequency, effectivity, expenditure, types, beliefs, perception and attitude of those patients with diabetes mellitus on complementary alternative medication (CAM) as they are visiting the outpatient primary care clinics.

A total of two hundred and fifty-two subjects were eligible in the original cohort, among them, twelve declined to take part in the research, and in the end, two hundred and forty were enrolled in the study, and there was a response rate of ninety-five percent. The samples drawn were mostly women with an average age of fifty-five point one four plus or minus ten.

The instruments of variable that were used in the study are clearly defined to be the independent variables. The SPSS v.19 was used to analyze the data. Descriptive statistics such as standard deviation, percentages, frequencies, and means were calculated. Chi-square was used to determine the relationship between social-demographic factors such as race, gender, religion, and alternative medications usage. The predictors of alternative medication were identified using multivariate logistic regression.

Twelve participants refused to participate, lowering the number of samples from 152 to 140. This increases the chance of having a type I error in the research, though the numbers of participants who dropped were not large enough to complicate the whole process.

The results relate to the previous studies that associate the complementary alternative medication with preventive health behavior. According to Robinson, et al. (2002), those who use alternative medicine for treatment of diabetes are 1.5 times less likely to have advanced effects of diabetes compared to those who are not taking any medication. It also relates to the studies that stated the frequency of alternative medication intake in Diabetes Mellitus patients has a broad range of 17–72.8 percent due lack of reliable supporting data (Hutch, R. A. (2011).

The study has implications on the clinical issues since some of the ethnic groups have failed to take the western medication but solely rely on the complementary alternative medication (Hutch, 2012).